Planned Parenthood fires staffer in Live Action video

Ed MorrisseyPosted at 2:01 pm on May 29, 2012

Lila Rose and Live Action get results, don’t they? Shortly after the pro-life group released a video taken at the Austin, Texas Planned Parenthood clinic that showed a staffer explaining how to get a gender-selective abortion — and how to commit Medicaid fraud along the way — the national chain of abortion clinics announced that they had fired the staffer. The announcement should raise a few eyebrows, however:

This spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America also told The Huffington Post that the organization condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide “high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into” its health centers. That means that no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions (Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Illinois).

But they also complained that the video was edited, and that it depicted a “hoax patient encounter”:

A Planned Parenthood spokeswoman told The Huffington Post on Tuesday the staffer in the video “did not follow our protocol” for dealing with “a highly unusual patient scenario.”

“Planned Parenthood insists on the highest quality patient care, and if we ever become aware of a staff member not meeting these high standards we take swift action,” she said in a written statement. “Within three days of this patient interaction, the staff member’s employment was ended and all staff members at this affiliate were immediately scheduled for retraining in managing unusual patient encounters. Today opponents of Planned Parenthood are promoting an edited video of that hoax patient encounter.”

LifeNews notes that PP hasn’t put this statement on their website or Facebook page as of yet, but the statement raises a couple of questions. If they think the video was edited to present the staffer unfairly, then why did they fire her? I assume the “hoax patient encounter” is an argument that a normal patient (ie, one who isn’t an undercover reporter) wouldn’t have received this kind of advice, but (a) that’s pretty hard to believe after watching the video, and (b) if it were true, they wouldn’t have fired the staffer or scheduled the entire clinic for retraining.

That’s not the only contradiction in the statement. Far more troubling is the statement in the first excerpt that at once condemns gender-selective abortion, then insists that Planned Parenthood will provide them, apparently as a privacy issue — but not in four states that explicitly prohibit the practice. If Planned Parenthood really “condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender,” then why perform them at all on that basis? They don’t have any specific obligation, legal or otherwise, to provide services that truly contradicts with their value systems. In four states, PP argues that they comply with prohibitions against the act they explicitly condemned in this statement, so they have the ability and wherewithal to refuse.

Clearly, either PP doesn’t “condemn” gender-selective abortions at all, or they place a greater value on cash than on their purported principles … or both.